Solupay Blog

If you had told someone 5 years ago that anyone would be able to use their smartphone almost as a credit card, they probably would have said you were nuts. However, over the past year, companies have been creating apps that do just that. These “mobile wallets” as they are called allow for payment information to be stored securely on a smartphone and payments to be made when a user opens the app. These apps have quickly spread out and are being used by so many people. PayPal, Google Wallet, and Apple Pay are only three examples of these mobile wallets that make paying for items so much easier. Of course, the technology is fairly complex, but at its most basic level, NFC chips in the area communicate with the smartphone to store payment information and then transmit it. This technology is brand new and it is becoming so common that it must leave you wondering, what else is this technology capable of? What is the future? Where will we be a year from now?

When Visa calls, Solupay delivers. Visa requested multiple mobile payment terminals for an Apple Pay commercial with only a few days notice this Spring. Tall order? Yes. Complex? You bet. Did we pull it off? Absolutely!

Visa has some cool stuff in the pipeline, and we at Solupay love it! Check out the Visa Apple Pay video, now trending with over 2.7M views:

Companies have been talking about replacing credit cards with smartphones. And that finally became a reality on October 20, 2014. All the biggest players hopped on board right away, along with 500 banks and 220,000 retail locations. So how’re things going now? Let’s take a look.

So far, Apple Pay is killing it. Early on in November 2014, it was already accounting for 1% of all digital payments, said an article at TechRadar. Google Wallet, which has been around since May 2011, accounts for 4% of digital payments.

On top of that, Apple’s loyal following is making significant use of the service. 60% of Apple’s users used the service more than once in a month. To put that in perspective, the same metric is just 20% at Paypal.

And feedback about the mobile wallet is generally positive, or even very positive. For example, this article notes 52.6% of those surveyed ApplePay users think it’s “amazing” and “easy-to-use.” Just 3.5% said it didn’t work for them, while 1.8% said it was difficult to use. That’s a pretty good satisfaction rate for a service not even 6 months old.

But there’s a long battle to wage yet! While ApplePay is certainly off to a good start, they have a long way to go. In terms of market share, Paypal controls 50% of the market, while Google Wallet contributes to 1/3 of Paypal’s share. Then there’s other competitors like Amazon Payments, V.me, ISIS, and LevelUp.

There is a lot of buzz in the industry about Apple Pay and the hackers that have exploited the security behind the new mobile wallet trend. In the last two months, there has been a spike in fraudulent activity with Apple Pay. Despite the robust security built into Apple Pay, criminals have quickly found a work around and are setting up new iPhones with stolen credit card information, then impersonating the actual credit card account holder. They are using additional information easily found online about the person, thus tricking the financial institution into thinking they are the authorized user in order to verify the new card.

An article was published this week by Payments Source Media that certainly got our attention and we wanted to share with our subscribers. There is a great deal of interest among consumers, merchants, banks and the media about Apple Pay. We have written a good majority of our articles the past few weeks about it, including one of our most popular posts, "Is Apple Pay the Future Mobile Payments Leader?"

With the release of Apple Pay last week, every news resource seems to be talking it up, raising questions about the underlying technology that makes Apple Pay possible. Here are a few common questions that people are asking, and why it may just revolutionize the mobile payment industry:

What is NFC Technology?

It stands for “Near FieldCommunications.” It’s simple to understand. NFC is a short-range, low-power wireless technology just like Bluetooth. It uses radio frequency and transfers minuscule amounts of data between devices you hold just a few inches apart. Currently, what it does is uniquely identify you and your bank account to a merchant’s computer. Smartphone owners can also create peer-to-peer radio communications and easily pass data from one smartphone to another.

Many companies have tried (and failed) at mobile payments. You have so many different competitors in the arena, each trying to grab their market share. Retailers, POS vendors, Visa, Mastercard, mobile operating system makers – they’ve all tried but haven’t succeeded.

So who better than Apple to make it happen?

We’ll see how they do, but these are some of the top features of Apple Pay that could make it the new mobile payment leader:

...And why merchants should offer it now to increase their own revenue.

Apple Pay - Apple's new mobile payment service - lets iPhone 6, 6 Plus, and Apple Watch owners make payments using NFC with their devices. It allows these Apple devices to wirelessly communicate with the Point of Sale terminal or Pin Pad at checkout with a dedicated chip that stores your encrypted payment information. For IPhone 6 and 6+, your identity and security is confirmed by holding your fingerprint to the phone, or the presence of your skin detected beneath the Apple Watch.

Here are three reasons I believe Apple Pay will take off in the coming months, and why merchants should consider adding an Apple Pay POS terminal to increase their own profits: